Internet Marketing - Paul Fleming - Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

Many of us saw it coming but honestly I didn’t think it would be this early. For mine, it was a no-brainer, a way to get numbers and action on their own social system Google+ and also an way to increase Search personalization which they have been increasingly moving towards for a few years now. Some question whether there is value in doing so and often search results can be a lot worse with personalization but they’re sticking to their guns.

I recently noticed the announcement on my search results explaining the latest updates. 

This takes you to a page that further explains their new service and in typical google fashion includes a video and tells us that “search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends.” Maybe.

So first things first, if you’re looking to be part of this latest Search iteration get yourself a Google+ profile. For businesses, create a page. Set up your circles, start following, engaging, sharing. Start getting comfortable with it, I think it’s only going to continue in its importance.

Google recently announced that they will be encrypting Search for logged-in users. It’s their way of saying that we are looking out for the searchers’ best interests by making sure the data of “signed in” users is not susceptible to being stolen or tracked or used or abused. I’m not privy to the specifics of how secure or not secure it really is but in doing so they have also announced that website owners with analytics will not be able to view the keywords that these visitors used to access their website. Now website owners will see a (not provided) referral from Google. Somehow Paid Search is immune to this tightening of security and speculation is rife that this move was targeted at SEO companies. If anything, the target is the business owner who might be interested in this granular data and ends up jumping on the Adwords bandwagon, forking over more money to big G. But that’s the conspiracy theorists. I’m more inclined to suggest that it’s a shame that this is the only solution they have been able to come up with. While SEO’s are impacted, the business owners are the ones who are really being borked by this latest move.

So for us, it’s really just a matter of here we go again, how do we adapt what we do without diluting impact for our clients? Right now we’re not 100% certain, we continue to do what we do and start to address any anomalies in our reports as they come through but you should expect to see a reduction in the number of keywords driving visitors to your website (so far it’s a pretty small number). Rankings (for what they are worth) will remain trackable but the detailed keyword referrals will no longer apply.

So that’s a shame, not the end of the world as some SEO companies fear but a real shame. Forget about SEO and Internet Marketing companies who report on these statistics. Think about the website owners, especially those who use this data to help focus their business strategies and goals. Again, not the end of the world for them but a loss of some very valuable information.

We all have our own little way of doing things to make our professional lives easier or better or clearer. Sometimes these are tools that we have stumbled across, other times recommendations from friends or colleagues and other websites or blogs similar to this one. One thing that Dinkum does at the foundation of all of our Internet Marketing campaigns is Search Marketing and, for the longest time, so much of what we did was very manual. Over the years we have adopted tools that makes us more efficient and improves what we do for our clients. These are the business tools (seo things) that I personally use on a daily basis to make sure that we stay on top of our game.

iGoogle – this is my own little dashboard with relevant information that I have gathered and continue to gather. My page is pretty long but it contains quite a few very useful pieces which includes my email, calendar, client blog feeds, industry blog feeds, google hot trends, sticky notes…a lot of good stuff that can be viewed at a glance.

Raven – there’s a lot to like about Raven, they’ve provided a great deal of value under one roof. All of our clients go straight into this tool including target keywords, Google Analytics not to mention the keyword research tools that they provide. For us though it’s the reporting capabilities that we love, taking what was once a very manual process and automating many parts of it.

Social Mention and Google Alerts – a bit part of what we do is listening on behalf of our clients. What’s going on? Is there buzz? Are customers complaining? Are there opportunities we can leverage? For this, Google Alerts has traditionally been our tool of choice but increasingly we have been in need of something a little more comprehensive which is where www.socialmention.com comes in. Pop your keyword in (or URL) and create an email alert or grab the RSS feed and pop it into iGoogle.

Open Site Explorer – this tool built by the folks at SEOMoz (also a very useful resource) provides a wealth of relevant information about a website or competitors.  It shows the number of links, anchor text distribution and  linking pages as well as their own rating scales.

Tweetdeck – This has become my tool of choice for updating my Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Foursquare accounts as well as a very useful realtime listening option. Best of all its free….for now (it was recently bought by Twitter, so we will wait to see what happens next).

What tools are in your daily toolkit?  Share with us in the comments.

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/604255

Inspired by a recent post by Philadelphia PR Brendan Shank outlining what not to do and more not what to do’s for a press release, we want to take it one step further and dissect what an SEO will do to a press release once it has done the rounds.

Let me preface this by suggesting that we are not a PR firm. Some folks seem to mistake us for one but honestly we do not do PR. Press Releases on the other hand, we will use and abuse (not really abuse, let’s call it leverage) for our personal gain. So here’s our favored process:

1. PR person puts together press release.
2. PR person distributes press release through their usual channels.
3. PR person gives us press release
4. We research press release contents to determine best keyword strategy (we’ll choose up to 3 targets)
5. We adjust press release (generally pretty slight modifications to include keyword phrase groupings and anchor text) to accommodate keywords.
6. We send back to PR rep (or client) for approval
7. We distribute through our online channels
8. We track and measure online visibility

Sometimes we do it alongside the PR person’s process in order to expedite but it’s important that we still adjust the press release enough to differentiate between our distribution and theirs. It’s not that we don’t care how many people read the press release in fact we encourage it, but this is not our primary objective. We want incoming links. We want controlled anchor text. Increased visibility is merely an added bonus.

Some people consider our role in the process contributes to diluting the power and value of the press release but naturally I am not of that mindset. Let me just borrow Shank’s phrasing here and suggest that

“for the time being, and done well, press releases continue to be a high-ROI way to tell your story to your most important audiences and build credibility and visibility.”

All we’re really doing is extending the life and findability (which I’m pretty sure is not a real word but seems more appropriate than any others I can think of) of content that is already created.

So for us, it’s really about the incoming links. Often the actual quality of incoming links is questionable, but we do see these releases getting picked up and reposted on other websites and blogs, and with it a handful of high quality, relevant incoming links. Very nice thank you. While I kind of skipped over the keyword research stuff, this is actually the most valuable part of the process so do not ignore it. Maybe one day I’ll take you through it.